Facebook users offered 6 months of free security with McAfee

Facebook seems to be on a mission to make its social network a safer place to visit and use. At the end of last year McAfee said that both Twitter and Facebook would be top malware targets in 2010 and Facebook is already taking steps to counteract that.

Earlier this week the social network started testing a new Ignore feature to help block unwanted friend spamming. Today another surprising addition has been made. Facebook has teamed up with McAfee to offer all users six months of free protection using McAfee’s Internet Security suite.

To get the free protection just navigate to the “Protect Your PC” tab on McAfee’s Facebook page. There you will gain access to the security suite, a custom scanning and repair tool, as well as education material created in conjunction with Facebook.

Once your six month period is up McAfee is also promising to give users a discounted rate at which to continue their subscription to the security software. For its part Facebook does not get any of that additional revenue.

Todd Gebhart, executive vice president and general manager of McAfee Consumer, Mobile and Small Business said:

Facebook is very serious about security and has made significant efforts to protect its users and service by investing in dedicated teams and sophisticated systems, and this partnership with McAfee furthers that mission. We believe our partnership will make a real difference in the battle to secure the Internet by giving so many more people access to industry leading technology from McAfee.

Facebook has already developed and deployed a unique new system for dealing with accounts that have been compromised. McAfee also look to be adding to that system by providing a system scan and clean function as part of the process.

I think this partnership benefits both companies, but is more lucrative for McAfee. They have exclusive access to 350 million Facebook users who are being told to secure their machines. Even a small percentage of those users signing up after six months will be a large revenue boost for McAfee.

It’s nice to see this happening, and at least the protection period is significantly longer than the 30 or 60 days you usually get with a new PC. No doubt McAfee will start to remind users they need to re-subscribe and pay when they reach month five in the hope of keeping that person as a paying customer.

With Microsoft as a shareholder I’m surprised Security Essentials wasn’t considered for this role, but then MSE isn’t a complete solution which is what Facebook needs to be pushing and what users should be using if they don’t know which free apps to run together to form a complete security solution.